The openness of wireless communication network leads to a problem that the attacker is easy to inject malicious data or tamper with the content of the legitimate messages in the process of wireless transmission. Broadcast packets authentication is an effective solution against most of the possible attacks, and it can make the fixed recipient receiving, the expected data. Using, data signature technology based on public key infrastructure (e.g., RSA or DSA) involves intensive computing in the signature verification, leading to serious resource consumption and increasing serious burden to the resource limited mobile devices. With the development of wireless communication, security and privacy risks of mobile electronic commerce become the focus of attention. The mobile terminal, the Wi-Fi network card and RFID tags are in urgent need of certifications of low complexity and low cost. In view of the situation of limited resources, a security scheme of lightweight cipher machine of TESLA technology was put forward. Although TESLA is one of the best known solution, it still requires synchronization between nodes, and vulnerable to denial of service attack. Wherein the attacker blocks the legitimate sender by continuously sending time synchronization request, it harms the safety intensity of lightweight cipher machine. At present, most wireless communication solutions can only authenticate the first frame when the terminal accesses to network, and the following packet cannot be authenticated, which may lead, to a lot of security problems, such as ID tracking, man-in-the-middle attack and malicious node attack, etc.
Recently, some researchers have turned to use the physical information to improve the safety of wireless communication, trying to combine the existing authentication and the physical authentication scheme based on channel information, aim at achieving the lightweight and fast authentication. These researches use the uniqueness of the physical channel response in time and space to make the channel response between communication nodes can only be identified by legitimate sender and receiver like fingerprints, and integrate the existing message authentication scheme and the authentication mechanism of physical layer. However, the time and space uniqueness of communication channel is in the midst of high speed crowded environment; and this method is only applicable to the situation that the time interval between two time slots is less than the coherence time, and the rate of movement is very low. When the time interval between two time slots of the communication parties is greater than the channel coherence time, they need upper layer authentication.
The uniqueness of radio frequency (RF) fingerprint is another important resources which can used to identify the state of the transmitter. This kind of uniqueness is related to electrical components, lines of printed circuit board, internal paths of integrated circuit and high precision and the filter output of high bandwidth of the oscilloscope display of wireless transmitter in RF, and the difference between the instantaneous signals can be reflected. There is a big different between RF fingerprint of equipment from different manufacturers. It is revealed that the RF fingerprints are different even in the same range of wireless network cards; thus RF fingerprint can be used to identity the wireless transmitter.